Power Consumption & Temperatures
On to the last tests of the day, the only ones not related to performance; power consumption and temperature tests.
We performed the power consumption tests with a watt meter in the wall outlet and jotted down the numbers during idle and five minute load on the graphics card in MSI’s Kombustor, where also noted the highest achieved temperature during the five minutes. The numbers are for the entire system, and not exact in any way, but more a hint.
| Power consumption Idle/load [W] |
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For power consumption NVIDIA is about where we expected with a TDP of 60W more than HD 5870. GTX 480 is far from energy efficient and it hasn’t managed to get the idle power down, since it rests 20W above AMD. below are the temperatures.
| Temperatures Kombustor, 1280×1024, 300s [°C] |
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The NVIDIA card gets hopelessly hot as a result of the semi-extreme power consumption, interestingly it gets hotter than HD 5970, the only card that gets close is XFX HD 5830, but that’s because of the subpar cooler.
Do note that all tests have been done on an open test bench, in a case the temperatures will be 10-15°C higher. NVIDIA claims that the GF100 core can handle 105°C fine, above this temperature the card will downclocked to save heat. You will most likely hit that temperature inside a case after some action with Kombustor.
This heat development also makes the card relatively loud, especially since the card seems to have the upper limit set at 95°C in BIOS, over that the fan goes wild , the result is that the card is barely audible when idle and very noisy during load.
Oh well, let’s gather our thoughts and energy for a last feat of strength. The conclusion follows.
